How can the Sudanese be helped?

27Jul

I’ve scrolled the inter webs, talked to friends from my old employment – a humanitarian organization working in all parts of the globe including Darfur – and read various histories and accounts of the situation in Sudan. Trying always to understand why a nation let’s it’s people get slaughtered and seemingly turns a blind eye to what is happening.

There are those rallying around the president of Sudan post indictment by the ICC for crimes against humanity, there are those in Darfur who cheered him on a recent visit, or so they say, though there is some indication the cheering was not nearly as loud as we have been led to believe.

I’ve real the angry posts, how dare the world especially the US indict our president.

My understanding is the United States is not part of the ICC, yet some are saying this will just give the US the ability to get it’s grimy little hands on Sudan and it’s oil.

Indeed China has a heads up there and is arming the government against it’s own people so I’m not sure exactly where the threat is from.

In all this I hear very little outcry for the slaughtered, raped and displaced in Darfur, not even from their own countrymen, and it perplexes me.

I’m used to seeing my countrymen protesting their governments actions, calling their politicians out, calling for impeachment, and even trying place citizens arrests on the architect of the Bush’s pretentious war in Iraq. Many call for Bush and his cabinet to be charged with war crimes, we are not naive nd work to our own end in this country all the time.

I imagine we would be frightened and angry should the world indict our president. As much as many in my country loathe the current government and were appalled and powerless as we struck a pre-emptive war under false pretense in a country where a population was more than fifty percent children under the age of 15. A war resulting in the deaths of almost a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians, and displacement of a million Iraqi civilians. As much as some feel the treatment of prisoners of war was against the Geneva Conventions we’d probably still be pissed if the rest of the world indicted our president. Scared to.

My opinion on whether my government should be prosecuted for war crimes not withstanding some might argue our government’s intent was to protect us from the threat of terrorism post the attack on our country on 9-11, therefore the intent was not to murder innocent people, but to protect us. There was no intent of genocide, the deaths in Iraq were the result of a need to protect, a disastrous one, and one some — including myself — feel our president should answer for, but intent is what drives the law, most laws as I understand it.

What was Al-Bashir’s intent I wonder, when he armed people to kill, rape, plunder and displace his own people?

Politics runs everything, greed is a pretty close second, no matter what country you live in, no matter if you are under the rule of a tyrannical dictator or a democratically elected president.

My question really is — this article I’m linking to below asks — a question which has never been answered in one unified voice is